Devouring knowledge

To fully use the discussed
techniques you will need a computer running Windows, Internet
Explorer and
SuperMemo
2004 for Windows (freeware). If you do not have one of the above, skip the blue
inserts. For simpler solutions that do not have these requirements read: Six
steps to excellent memory

Marvin Minsky: Our cultures don't
encourage us to think much about learning. Instead we regard it as
something that just happens to us. But learning must itself consist of
sets of skills we grow ourselves; we start with only some of them and slowly grow the rest. Why don't more people keep on learning more and
better learning skills? Because it's not rewarded right away, its payoff
has a long delay

This article summarizes my 20-year-long effort in developing techniques and technologies that assist
human learning. It should help you quickly convert your learning into a
rationally controlled and conscious process. I believe, it describes the tools that collectively account for the
fastest learning approach in existence.
If knowledge is important to you, this article should help you optimize your
path towards your goals. Among others, we will discuss two concepts that can
have a dramatic effect on learning:

Knowledge and history: Throughout the ages, knowledge was the
cornerstone of human progress. From Stone Age to Information Age, in pain, we have built
a tiny oasis of civilization in ruthless expanses of the evolving universe.
The history of the mankind is made of billions of individual lives that keep on
sparking and fading. Born of self-preservation instincts imprinted by evolution,
history books paint a picture of a constant string of wars, conflict of
interest, loss and gain of influences, lust for power and submission to
weaknesses of human nature. On the other hand, the greatest achievement of the
evolution, the rational mind, kept on contributing to new findings, discoveries,
technologies and philosophies. Progress has always hinged on discovering new
truths and preserving them for posterity in form of stories, solutions,
tools, books, and other carriers of information. Knowledge is the basis of
human power, yet it constantly struggles with two forces that regularly diminish
it: death and forgetting. We can preserve knowledge in books and other
forms of information storage. However, this knowledge translates to value only
then when it is used by the creative power of the human brain. The limitations of the human
brain will remain a bottleneck of progress for many years to come. We will
develop artificially intelligent knowledge processors not earlier than in a
decade or two

Knowledge and death: Death poses an ageless challenge of educating new generations. Years of hard work needed to gain knowledge on
professorial level are obliterated in a single act of death. Newborns need to go
through years of education before they are able to access, read, and comprehend
this text. They all have to struggle with basic literacy skills, lessons of safe
sex and teen pregnancy, lessons on superiority of altruism over egoism, the
difference between wise and not-so-wise choices, existential questions, etc. Although constant reeducation may contribute to gaining a fresh
perspective in each generation, it is also painfully wasteful. As yet, there is
no efficient remedy to the death of knowledge. All we can do is to attach more
weight to healthy lifestyle and health research. Those two promote longevity of
knowledge in a single generation

Knowledge and forgetting: Forgetting is a natural process that makes
it possible to efficiently use the limited memory space of the brain. We forget
to dispose of knowledge deemed less important in order to make space for
knowledge of higher importance. Currently we have only a limited
control over what we remember and what we forget. Today, the most important tool
that we can use to prevent forgetting is practice. We can minimize time needed
for practice by using spaced
repetition (i.e. learning technique based on computing optimum intervals between
repetitions). Spaced repetition is the key to maximizing knowledge within a
single human lifetime (see below for more details)

Immortal knowledge: Artificial intelligence is our best hope
for approaching immortal knowledge. It can nearly eliminate the problem of
death (except for the heat death of the universe). It can also eliminate the
problem of forgetting (at least within the bounds of the available
storage). Today, however, the best path towards immortal knowledge must still rely on
the use of the human brain by maximizing its learning capacity

There are five main areas where the learning process can be enhanced. All
these areas will be discussed in this article:

access to knowledge- this article will make an assumption that the
Internet is your main source of knowledge. You can later easily extrapolate
the discussed skills to accessing other sources of knowledge

selecting knowledge- we will assume that you are solely
responsible for selecting knowledge you want to learn. Your ability to
select valuable information will grow in proportion to the acquired
knowledge. This article will show you the tools that can assist you in this
process

reading- reading is the process in which
knowledge for the first time makes an actual intimate contact with your
brain. Traditionally, it is streamed into your memory in a more or less
linear manner (i.e. paragraph after paragraph). This article will help you
delinearize this process and optimize reading by enhancing knowledge
selection and prioritization concurrent with reading. For example, you
will be able to say This paragraph can be processed later or This
paragraph requires utmost attention now or This paragraph can be
skipped for good even if I decide to read the article again, or I
want to read this paragraph again in three days and in more detail or I
want to mark this paragraph with lower-priority and come to it only after
all higher priority paragraphs have been processed, etc.

representing knowledge- the way in which you present knowledge
will affect comprehension and retention (i.e. how well you remember). Things that are simple are easier to
understand. Things that are simple are also easier to remember. Many people
do not realize the degree to which simplicity can affect learning. Many
people doubt that even the most complex material can be presented in a very
simple way. Einstein noticed that "it should be possible to explain
the laws of physics to a barmaid"

remembering knowledge- this article will tell you how to eliminate
the problem of forgetting once and for all. It will encourage you to use the
learning technique based on spaced repetition and commercially known as
SuperMemo (from Super Memory). SuperMemo produces immense savings in
time by scheduling review of the studied material only then when the review
is necessary (see: Introduction to SuperMemo)

life cycle of knowledge-
this article will show you an approach in which knowledge in your memory keeps
on evolving and maturing. This will involve continual rewording,
reprioritizing, and re-associating pieces of knowledge. You
will often give up portions of knowledge that become outdated or lose
their high-priority status. You will apply the rules of knowledge
representation that will make knowledge easy to remember. Your knowledge
will also become more associative in time. In other words, it will become a
more suitable ground for making intelligent choices

using knowledge- knowledge translates to value when it is properly
used. In the long-run, skills discussed in this article will indirectly help
you become more creative and skillful in using your own knowledge. Not
surprisingly, your skills needed to efficiently use knowledge are also part
of knowledge itself and tend to grow spontaneously as your knowledge
increases

The Internet is an excellent source of knowledge. Its quality and role will
for long continue increasing exponentially as more and more people appreciate its
potential and contribute to its growth. There are still many complementary
sources of information that compete successfully with the Internet. However, it
is only a question of time before you will be safely able to rely on the
Internet as your sole source of information.

The three main factors that limit
the value of the Internet as the source of information today:

verification - there are no formalized peer-review or other verification
mechanisms that would make it easy for you to ascertain the reliability of
information available and trustworthiness of authors. The burden of proof is on you.
You either need to tap onto reputable sites or judge the reliability of
individual authors on preponderance of evidence. Consequently, reputable
scientific journals are still an unmatched source of raw research data (cf. Pierre
Salinger syndrome)

bandwidth - popular broadband access to the Internet is still to
come. This limits availability of quality video documentaries, video
reporting, video education, interactive material, etc. Consequently, television
and multimedia titles have still a
substantial role to play as an educational tool

micropayments - authors still see the printed matter as their main
source of income. In the future, your credit account may be charged to a
microscopic amount each time you access a selected page on the web if the
author decides to make it a source of his or her income. This may ultimately
cause a massive exodus of authors from the traditional publishing industry
towards the net with immense benefit to those mining for quality data on the
net

Despite the Internet's limitations, you can safely commit yourself today to making
the net your chief source of knowledge in your quest for new knowledge in nearly
all areas of well-rounded self-instruction. The abundance of free encyclopedias,
journals, dictionaries, databases, stand-alone articles and thematic websites is
mind-boggling.

All you need for the purpose of knowledge access is a web browser and basic net-searching skills
combined with an understanding of the power of individual
search engines such as www.google.com

Throughout this article, I will try to demonstrate that you will need a
tool for efficient prioritizing and reviewing information: SuperMemo
2004 for Windows. The true power and importance of SuperMemo comes from
ensuring high retention of knowledge. SuperMemo 2004 will also help you greatly increase the quality of reading by means of a technique called:
incremental reading. In addition to its main strengths, SuperMemo can also
assist in the field of knowledge access. You will certainly face the need to fill the gaps in
your knowledge in many more areas than your time permits or your memory makes
possible. You can ask SuperMemo to help you scrupulously note down and
prioritize all areas of knowledge
that need an enhancement!

The extent of global knowledge resources can be measured in terabytes. One
terabyte is a thousand gigabytes, while one gigabyte is a rough equivalent of
the Encyclopaedia Britannicawhose
44 million words would most likely all fit
your today's hard disk space. The US Library of Congress is estimated to
amount to 25 terabytes of knowledge. Human DNA code kept at Celera takes 80
terabytes. At the same time, the so-called deep
web(year 2000) may encompass as much as 7,500 terabytes (deep web
includes the static web extended by dynamic information retrievable from web
databases). It will take only three years from today to produce more data than
in the whole of human history (say researchers
at the University of California).

Only a fraction of those resources can be mastered by an individual in a
single human lifetime. Even a single copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
goes in detail far beyond what a single human being can encompass in a lifetime!
The actual speed of learning and lifetime learning limits can be measured with
SuperMemo (see: Theoretical aspects of
SuperMemo).

The microscopic capacity of the human brain has not prevented it from
building the present civilization as we know it. The human power comes
from:

collective effort - a billion heads is more than one

specialization of labor - all collective tasks are subject to
top-down functional decomposition and a single brain usually only needs to
process a fraction of information at a time

knowledge selection skills - the associative power of the human
brain combined with the selective nature of forgetting help us retain
memories that are actually most useful in problem solving

This article will show you how to prevent forgetting. However, forgetting
plays an important role in our lives. It runs a valuable garbage collection on
knowledge we acquire daily. If the power
of forgetting is taken away, your responsibilities in the area of selecting
knowledge increase manifold!

SuperMemo will help you eliminate
forgetting! At the same time, it will increase your responsibility for selecting knowledge that is truly important and applicable. If used
without care and attention, SuperMemo may actually waste your time by
helping you remember reels of garbage trivia

A piece of information that occupies just several bytes of your hard disk
may carry a relative value that my translate to a net gain of millions of
dollars as well as a net loss of millions of dollars. It may also carry no value
whatsoever. For example, a sentence written in French "SuperMemo vous aide à mémoriser et apprendre diverses informations comme une langue, des chiffres, etc."
may be of nearly zero value for someone who does not know French. At the same
time, an item related to a Heimlich
maneuver can save the life of a family member. We know that the
expected payoff equals the value of the payoff multiplied by its probability;
therefore, the low
probability of a family member choking and the probability of actual successful application
of the maneuver make the value of "Heimlich item" a fraction of the
value of the human life. At the same time, even minor errors in medical knowledge of a
physician can actually cost somebody's life and carry substantial negative value!

Frequently, you will find more
benefit in memorizing the three best things you have learnt today than
in memorizing a whole monothematic article to the last detail!

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be
entirely uneducated (Alec Bourne)

I have mentioned earlier that SuperMemo 2004 can help you prioritize
knowledge areas and topics that you want to study. In a similar way, SuperMemo
2004 will help you prioritize articles you locate on the net and decide to study
in detail.

Importing articles to SuperMemo 2004

To import an important article to SuperMemo, follow these steps:

Select the imported text in your web browser and copy the selection
to the clipboard (e.g. with Ctrl+C)

Switch to SuperMemo (e.g. with Alt+Tab)

In SuperMemo, press Ctrl+Alt+N (this is equivalent to Edit
: Add a new article on the main menu). SuperMemo will create a new
element, apply the reading template (i.e. a template with one
scaleable HTML component), and
paste the article

Optionally, use Ctrl+J to specify the first review interval
(e.g. one day for high priority material or 30 days for low priority
material)

Tips:

To import many articles at once from Internet Explorer, use Edit
: Import web pages (Shift+F8)

To type your own notes to SuperMemo, use Edit : Add to category :
Note (Alt+N)

If you would like to store pictures locally (in the registry),
and make them proliferate in incremental reading (i.e. show up in all
extracts and clozes), you will need to paste pictures separately. Use Copy
on the picture menu in the browser and then press Shift+Ins in
SuperMemo to paste the picture. As you should not keep more than 2-3
pictures per element in SuperMemo, you should paste pictures from
multi-picture articles only to relevant extracts of the main article

Traditional linear reading is highly inefficient. This comes from the fact
that various pieces of the text are of various importance. Some should be
skipped. Others should be read in the first order of priority. Old-fashioned
books are quickly being replaced with hypertext. Hypertext will help you quickly
jump to information that is the most important at any given moment. Hypertext
requires a different style of writing. After all, all texts will live by the
assumption that there has been some introductory section read before. The texts
become context-independent, and all difficult terms and concepts are
explained solely with additional hyperlinks. As the world wide web helped delinearize
the global resources of information, SuperMemo
2004 can help you delinearize
your reading of whatever linear material you decide to import to SuperMemo.
While reading with SuperMemo, you will see a linear text as a sequence of sections
subdivided into paragraphs and individual sentences. SuperMemo will help you
provide a separate and independent processing for each section, paragraph or
sentence. Here are some typical actions you will execute on individual
sections, paragraphs or sentences. Most typically you will decide one of the
following:

read and remember - you can read a paragraph and schedule it for a
future review. The timing of the review will depend on the paragraph's
priority

skip to read later - you can mark a paragraph as worth reading
later. The moment in which the paragraph will come back for reading will
depend on the paragraph's priority.

skip for ever - you can mark a paragraph as (1) not worth reading, or as
(2) read and not worth remembering

In SuperMemo, all material worth remembering will be scheduled for review in
the future. This is necessary to ensure you do not forget what you have learned.
At the same time, all material that has not been read but is classified as worth
reading will also be scheduled for reading in the future. In SuperMemo, you will
constantly face a serial process of reading, review, and repetition that will
make sure that your work with the program is challenging, interesting and leaves
permanent traces in your memory.

Reading with SuperMemo 2004

When reading an article in
SuperMemo
2004, you will process
individual paragraphs or sentences with commands available from the Reading
menu available with a right-click over the selected text.
For fastest processing, these commands are also available on the reading
toolbar:

You will begin reading an article in one of these
circumstances:

Learning process: The article's turn comes up
in the learning process (after choosing Learn or Ctrl+L)

Reading list: You pull the article from the top
of your reading list with Shift+Ctrl+F4

Immediate reading: You want to read the article
immediately after importing it to SuperMemo with Ctrl+Alt+N

Search: You locate the article in your
collection with navigation or search tools (e.g. with Ctrl+F)

Here are the typical actions you will perform on
individual sections, paragraphs and sentences:

Read and remember - you can read a paragraph,
select it with the mouse and choose Remember
extract (Alt+X or the green T icon). Remember extract will create a
new mini-article in SuperMemo and store it for review in a couple of
days. The review of the extract will be subject to the same procedures
as reading the entire article. In other words, you can only quickly
read the selected paragraph to get the general idea and read it in
detail only upon the first review

Skip and read later - if you see that a longer
section is important and requires more detailed reading, you can
execute Remember extract without reading the section at all.
You can also choose Schedule
extract and determine the first review interval (for example,
if you type "1", the first review will take place on the next day)

Skip for ever - if you believe that a given
part of text is not worth your time, you can choose Ignore(stop-sign icon). This will mark the text with a grayed font, and ensure you will not get into reading the same text again
in the future (e.g. on the next review)

If you believe the whole article should be skipped, you
can do the following:

Skip and read later - you will delay reading an
article if you believe its priority is less or if you think that you
need to read some other introductory articles first. For example, you
can stop reading and manually choose an interval after which you will
return to reading (Rescheduleor Ctrl+J ). You can also choose Forget
(e.g. at the bottom of the element
window or Ctrl+R) and put the article at the end of the queue
of articles waiting for review

Skip and retain in the archive - if you do not
expect to return to a given article but you still want to retain it in
SuperMemo, you can choose Dismiss (e.g. at the bottom of the element
window or Ctrl+D)

Skip and delete partially - if you believe an article is
not worth keeping in your SuperMemo collection, you can delete it
without deleting review material generated from the article. Use Learning
: Done or Ctrl+Shift+Enter

Skip and delete entirely - if you believe an article is
not worth keeping in your SuperMemo collection, you can delete it
along with all associated extracts, sections and paragraphs (use Del)

In SuperMemo, all imported articles will evolve. This evolution
will ensure maximum comprehension and retention of knowledge. Initially the
articles are split
into sections and paragraphs. Those sections and paragraphs are later
subject to regular review and further evolution. Individual paragraphs get enriched with context clues,
reference labels, and converted to individual sentences. Individual
sentences convey ideas which you want to remember. These ideas come back for
review at increasing intervals. Initially, the ideas come back every couple of days, later after
months and years. However, passively processed ideas in the form of sentences
rarely leave a durable trace in your memory even if they are reviewed regularly.
Very often, as soon as after 2-3 months, you will notice that at review time,
you actually do not seem able to recall that you have ever had a given sentence
in your collection. You will quickly discover that you need active recall
in order to remember. Active recall is a process in which you must answer
questions. For example, you may be presented with a
picture of Charles Darwin and be asked to recognize his face. In the long run,
you need to replace passive review with active recall. Otherwise, your memory of
the fact will not be permanently consolidated.

The fastest way of converting simple sentences into active recall material is
to use a cloze deletion technique (nb: cloze
is the correct spelling; please do not report an
orthographic error!). In the cloze deletion technique, you convert
simple declarative sentences like:

WW1 was precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Francis
Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in 1914

into question-answer pairs that can be used in actively stimulating your
memory for best recall:

Question: WW1 was precipitated by the assassination of
Archduke Francis Ferdinand of [...](country/empire)
by a Serbian nationalist in 1914
Answer: Austria-Hungary

Question: WW1 was precipitated by the assassination of
Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in [...](year)
Answer: 1914

Question: [...](war) was
precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of
Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in 1914
Answer: WW1

Active recall in SuperMemo 2004

To convert a sentence to a cloze deletion in SuperMemo
2004, select the appropriate keyword in the sentence (e.g. Austria-Hungary,
1914, WW1, etc.) and press Ctrl+Z. You can also choose Reading
: Remember clozeavailable with a right click over the selected
text, or click the blue Z-icon on the Read
toolbar.

If you would like to immediately reedit the newly created cloze
deletion, choose
button on the element toolbar or press Alt+Left. This will make it possible to add
context clues, shorten the text, improve the wording, etc.

Tip! Try to avoid using cloze deletion tools on
conglomerate paragraphs. Your cloze deletions should be as simple as
possible. Consequently, simplifying the parent paragraph to a simple
statement will produce simple clozes that will require little
processing. If you use Remember cloze on a longer multi-sentence
paragraph, you will have to put extra effort on simplifying the
resulting items. All cloze deletions should be short enough to ensure
you read them entirely at repetition time. Otherwise, your brain will
tend to "deduce" the answer from non-semantic clues. This will
defeat the purpose of learning!

The active recall issue in representing knowledge is just a tip
of the iceberg. You will need to master quite a number of skills that will
ensure your knowledge is:

Forgetting has been the number one problem in learning for ages.
All capable students know that it is not really hard to cram hundreds of pages
of material before an exam. But a great deal of the learned
knowledge is gone just 3-4 days later (esp. after an exhaustive
all-nighter). 50% of the quickly crammed
knowledge evaporates within a week or two. After a year or so, nearly all
material is forgotten unless reviewed. It is easy to notice that the repetition is
the key to remembering in the long run. Repetitio mater memoriae may date
back to Horace (65-8 BC).

In SuperMemo, review of the learned material is in the center of
the learning method. The review algorithm has started the whole concept of
SuperMemo in the early 1980s and the first software implementation
of SuperMemo in 1987 was based solely on repetitions of simple questions and answers.

SuperMemo makes it possible to remember, by default, 95% of the
learned material (see: General principles of
SuperMemo). You can program this retention level to fall between 90-99%. You can also
determine the retention individually for each of the pieces of information
subject to review. You can also use tools that will make it possible to
substantially increase the flow of information into SuperMemo at the cost of
retention.

With SuperMemo, you can nearly
eliminate the problem of forgetting! However, the cost of remembering is
still substantial. SuperMemo protects your memories from the
spontaneous process of forgetting and puts them in your own hands. Your persistence and conscious choices will determine what you remember and
what you decide to give up to forgetting

Remembering with SuperMemo 2004

All material introduced to SuperMemo 2004 will be subject to review.
This is all you need to remember:

on a daily basis choose Learn (or press Ctrl+L) and
go through the scheduled portion of the material (this will include
whole articles, their fragments scheduled for review, cloze
deletions and simple question-answer items)

if you proceed with your daily review until you get the message Nothing
more to learn, you are guaranteed to remember, by default, 95% of
the learned material

You will often introduce to SuperMemo more material than you are able
to review. You will therefore also need to consider the following:

the proportion of the material you remember can be changed
globally or for individual pieces of information (see: Forgetting
index)

if your review takes too much time, you can slow down the process
by which material stored in SuperMemo is actually introduced into
the learning process by answering No to Do you want to
learn new material? This will make excess material wait for
learning until you master the material that has already entered the
learning process

if you cannot keep up with review, you can choose rescheduling
tools (e.g. Postponeor Mercy).
For example, you can choose Learn
: Postpone : Topics
to postpone all articles scheduled for today

Knowledge stored in SuperMemo will gradually be transformed
and reformulated. This will also reflect changes to the corresponding
knowledge in your memory. Three main principles will underlie the evolution
of knowledge in SuperMemo:

decrease in complexity - articles will be converted
into sets of paragraphs. Paragraphs will be dismantled into sets of
independent sentences and statements. Sentences will be shortened to
maximize the contents-vs-wording ratio, etc.

incrementalism - all changes will take place
gradually in proportion to available time, with respect to your selected
material priority, and in line with the gradually increasing strength of
memory traces

The core of SuperMemo is review and repetition. Changes to
individual pieces of knowledge will take place in steps upon successive reviews. Here are exemplary steps that show
a complete evolution of a single article into a finished item based on active recall:

Imagine that you find an article on the net, e.g. The criticism of
global capitalism, and you decide to read it and remember it for ever

You import the article to SuperMemo

You read the article (e.g. once it tops your reading list or
once its turn comes up in incremental reading)

While reading, you extract most important paragraphs. One of
these, let us say, refers to Kuznets
hypothesis

The extracted paragraphs will assume a separate life in
SuperMemo and will be scheduled for separate review, i.e. independent of the
review of the parent article. The extracted paragraphs in the parent article will be
marked as processed. Once all paragraphs in the parent article are
processed, you will terminate the review of the parent article and keep
on reviewing only its components (e.g. selected paragraphs)

Upon the first review, usually after a few days, you read the
extracted paragraph again and
analyze it as to how it should be processed further. You may decide to
postpone it, remove it from the learning process, shorten it or extract the
most important sentences that you want to remember

If you decide to extract a single statement in reference to Kuznets
hypothesis it will again be marked as processed in the original
extract and will assume a
separate review cycle in SuperMemo

Upon the first review of the extracted sentence, you
make further decisions as to its further life in SuperMemo. Let us say, this
is the wording of the Kuznets sentence: Acc to Kuznets
hypothesis, growth (from the low income levels associated with predominantly
agrarian societies) would first lead to an increase, and then to a decrease
in income inequality

In order to capture the essence, you would probably decide to shorten the above sentence to the
following form: Acc
to Kuznets hypothesis, growth would first lead to an increase, and then to a
decrease in income inequality

At the same time, other parts of the same parent article
might establish a memory trace that would say that Kuznets
hypothesis has been based on relatively weak empirical data. Moreover,
recent research clearly indicates that the hypothesis is false (growth actually seems to
equally benefit both the poor and the rich). You could then enhance the
extract with words controversial or even recently falsified.
For example, Recently falsified Kuznets hypothesis claimed that growth
would first lead to an increase, and then to a decrease in income inequality

Upon the next review of the same sentence, you may decide to
convert it into a number of cloze deletions. This conversion will be
incremental, i.e. you may decide to first create a cloze deletion asking
about the name of the controversial hypothesis and only later ask about its
actual meaning (the meaning is relatively easier to remember and shall survive
longer in your memory without active recall). Your cloze deletion could
then look like this:

Question:Recently falsified [...](name)
hypothesis claimed that growth would first lead to an increase,
and then to a decrease in income inequalityAnswer: Kuznets

This cloze deletion would again assume a separate life from
the original sentence in which the keyword Kuznetswill again
be marked as processed. This is the original Kuznets sentence with
one keyword marked as processed: Recently falsified Kuznets
hypothesis claimed that growth would first lead to an increase, and then to
a decrease in income inequality

The same sentence will generate a few separate cloze
deletions that will be processed independently. Upon the first review of the cloze
deletion created in the previous point, you may decide to simplify it in accordance with the rules
of formulating knowledge in learning:

Question:Recently falsified [...](name)
hypothesis claimed that growth would first lead to an increase
in income inequalityAnswer: Kuznets

Upon the next review, you can, but you do not have to,
convert the cloze deletion into a standard question-answer item:

Question: What is the name of the hypothesis that
falsely claims that income inequality initially increases with growth?Answer: Kuznets hypothesis

The above question-answer pair is probably as simple as it
can only be. Certainly, it is simple enough to be relatively easy to
remember. This item will be repeated in intervals determined by SuperMemo.
You can decide how well you want to remember it. By default, it will be
remembered with 95% probability of recall and require 5-15 repetitions in lifetime.
The establishment of durable memory traces in your memory, completes the
life cycle of this particular piece of knowledge. The only thing that
remains is the memory-sustaining review in intervals ranging from months to
years (as determined by SuperMemo)

Once you convert all important keywords from the Kuznets
hypothesis into separate cloze deletions, you will remove the parenting
paragraph from the review process. You will not longer passively review the
original declarative hypothesis. You will continue repeating individual clozes and
that will ensure your perfect recall of the hypothesis for as long as you
deem necessary

If you stop reading an article and return to it after a
month or so, you may find it hard to understand the text due to the fact
that the part read earlier will have already been partly forgotten while it might
have built a solid introduction needed for understanding the
remaining sections of the article.

In SuperMemo, reading articles in small parts does not pose a problem. The parts
read earlier enter the regular review process that ensures continual retention
of all pivotal points. Even more, SuperMemo encourages reading in small parts. This makes it possible to
read many articles at the same time, and portion the inflow of information into
the learning process in proportion to priority and available time.

The process or
reading many articles at the same time in small portions will later be called incremental reading.

Without
SuperMemo, incremental reading would not be possible. This comes from the fact that only
SuperMemo can ensure that you do not forget what you have read before. In other
words, if you return to the same article in a week or in a few months, you will
quickly recover the context and keep on reading as if you have read preceding
parts just minutes earlier.

The advantages of incremental reading
are numerous. They all are interdependent. Good retention enables incremental
reading. This provides variety which eliminates boredom, enhances
attention and affects creative associations. Good prioritization enhances the
speed of reading without affecting comprehension, and that in turn, eliminates
the stress of fast reading (worry of missing important pieces of information) and the stress of massive
reading (worry of losing track of one or more articles).

Here is the list
of the most prominent advantages of incremental reading:

knowledge structure and comprehension: Building knowledge in your brain
is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces cannot be placed in the
puzzle before the others. Some pieces capitalize on others. There is no
point in memorizing facts about Higgs boson before you learn what a standard
model is and that, in turn, should follow the general understanding of particle
physics which itself requires some ABC of physics. In incremental
reading, if you encounter texts related to Higgs boson you can
manually delay it until the time you hope your Physics ABC will
provide the ground for understanding. In traditional reading, you would just
waste your time on reviewing Higgs boson material. Traditionally,
your decision to
skip the material would provide no definite way of coming back to material
in the future. With incremental reading, you waste no time on reading
material you do not understand. At the same time, you can safely skip
portions of material and return to them in the future. You become the
master of the conscious knowledge building process

attention: Human brain has an in-built limit on the
attention span. We all get bored with things. This is often true even with
interesting articles once they get too long. Millions of people do a daily
channel zapping on TV. This absurd activity is driven precisely by the
craving for dense action and information variety. A gripping movie goes
"too slow" for a typical channel zapper. This is why he or
she prefers to watch three movies at the same time (even though the plot of
all will suffer). Incremental reading is a perfect remedy to the limited
attention span. Once you sense any sign of boredom or distraction, you can
jump to the next article with few negative side effects. Unlike in the case
of channel zapping though, you won't miss a bit of information. Just the
opposite, you will maximize attention per paragraph. Your attention to the
same piece of information may depend on your mood, amount of prior reading,
today's interest that may depend on the piece of news you heard on the
morning radio, etc. With incremental reading, you can fit your best
attention to each individual piece of reading

speed: Incremental reading will help you dramatically
increase the speed of your first reading of a selected text. You can quickly
jump from paragraph to paragraph, get the overall picture, mark fragments
for later reading, mark fragments for detailed study, etc. You will be
relieved of the greatest bottleneck of speed-reading: fear of missing
important pieces of information. As soon as you suspect a quickly-reviewed paragraph may
carry more importance than meets the eye, you can simply introduce it back
into the review process (as opposed to backtracking and reading the
paragraph again). Once you process the entire article, you can slowly digest
it again from the very beginning in the incremental reading process.
Incremental reading provides for speed-reading without detriment to
comprehension

prioritization: There are always many more articles
at hand than you can hope to read. Evaluating articles and prioritizing them
is difficult because you cannot do a good evaluation without actually
reading a part of the article in question. In incremental reading, you can read the
introduction and then decide when to read the rest. If an article is
extremely valuable or interesting, you can process it entirely at once.
Other articles can
slowly scramble through the learning process. Yet others may ultimately be
deleted. The prioritization will continue while you are reading the article.
If the evaluation of quality or content changes while reading, so will the
reading-review schedule. Prioritization tools will ensure that important
pieces of information will receive better processing. This is one of the
most important things about incremental reading: efficient fishing for
pieces of golden knowledge!

consolidation: Everything we learn must be reviewed
from time to time in order to be remembered. If you read an article in
intervals, you already begin the consolidation of memory which may save you
lots of time. In traditional reading, you would need to read the whole
article, and then to review the article later several times. With earlier
releases of SuperMemo, you would need to read the whole article, and then
only review the most important parts of the article in SuperMemo at intervals determined by
the program. Now you can begin the consolidation-review cycle already during
reading! By the time you convert parts of the material into clozes or
question-answer items, you will already have it well consolidated. This
pre-consolidation will often dramatically reduce the number of repetitions
required before your material gets to be reviewed in long intervals of
months and years

creativity: SuperMemo will throw at you various
articles, paragraphs, statements and questions in a most unexpected order.
You will be surprised to discover how this affects your creativity and helps
you generate unexpected associations of ideas. This will also provide your
brain with an entertaining form of mental training that will be highly
appreciated in all forms of professions based on intellectual performance.
Critics of incremental reading, who have never tried the method, are not convinced this argument is really
tenable. You may be skeptical too. There is only one sure way to convince
you: give incremental reading a good try! Try incremental reading for a
month at
times when your brain is in its peak shape. If the processed knowledge
belongs to the areas that are critically important to you, so much the
better. You may see your brain turn into a creative sparkler!

stresslessness: Once you know you can rely on
SuperMemo in presenting review material for you, you can eliminate
the stress and anxiety related to having too much to study or too much to
read. You will probably not manage to read or learn all that you would hope
for, but you will at least not lose sleep over planning and scheduling.
SuperMemo is a promise of the best use of your potential. With this
conviction, you can devote all your energy to comprehension and analysis of
the learned material

consistency: If your material contains contradictory parts, your brain will alert you to this fact. In classical learning, you
would often relearn new facts that would contradict earlier learned facts.
Then you would relearn the older version again and this wasteful cycle might
repeat more than once. In SuperMemo, the same process can take place;
however, there will be two mechanisms that will prevent it. High degree of
retention guaranteed by SuperMemo will often make it quite effortless to
immediately spot the contradiction: Wait a minute! I have already learned this fact
and the answer was different! Unfortunately, even SuperMemo isn't
hermetic to contradiction (your retention actually never reaches 100%). The
second mechanism will quickly produce the convergence of contradictory facts
in time. If you, for example, learn two different answers to What is the
size of human population?, say, 5.5 billion and 6 billion.
You will naturally provide a wrong answer to one of these questions. Once you
relearn it the new way, you will provide a wrong answer to the other
question. Inter-repetition intervals for these two contradictory items will get shorter
with each relearning cycle. The timing of repetitions of contradictory items will tend to converge. It is only a question of time when the red alert is raised by your
brain. You will quickly resolve the difference and delete one of the items. Similar
process will affect hazy or incompletely specified information. Your
knowledge will grow in consistency with time

massive learning: Massive learning is the consequence of
all advantages listed earlier. Incremental reading will run a
river of knowledge through your memory. The speed of acquiring new
information will surprise you. Even though human memory is painfully
limited, you shall be able to read thousands of texts pertaining to
different fields and quickly swell the size of your knowledge to your and
others' benefit

enjoyability: Those who can compare the classic
SuperMemo with incremental reading will testify that incremental reading is
by far more enjoyable. Monotonous repetitions are here interspersed with
reading and analyzing new material

Incremental reading tools in
SuperMemo 2004

To introduce an article to incremental reading - use Edit
: Add a new article (Ctrl+Alt+N). This will introduce
the article stored in the clipboard into the incremental reading
process

To resume reading - once you return to an interrupted
article, the cursor in the text will be set on the last-processed
text. When leaving the article, you can also manually set the so-called
read-point and the place where you interrupted reading. Choose Ctrl+F7
to set the read-point or choose the read-point button on the Read toolbar

To schedule the next review - if you want to schedule a
given article for review on a selected day, choose Learning
: Reschedule on the element menu (e.g. by pressing Ctrl+J).
You can also use Learning
: Execute repetition(e.g. by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R). Execute
repetition works like Reschedule with this difference that
a repetition will be executed before rescheduling

To add pictures - to add a picture to an article use Copy on the picture menu in
your web browser and then press Shift+Ins or Ctrl+V in SuperMemo to paste the
picture

To place the reading toolbar on your desktop - drag the Read toolbar from the toolbar dock
to any location that seems suitable and choose Ctrl+Shift+F5
(to save the default windows layout)

SuperMemo is not yet equipped with tools to help you
efficiently use your knowledge for good causes. It will boost your knowledge but ... you must be
vigilant: Do not spend your time on gaining knowledge for the knowledge sake! Think applicability!

Luckily, as your knowledge grows, so does your ability to
use it efficiently.